It’s been a while since my last post, and a lot has changed since then. Cataclysm came and when it did for a brief moment we were given a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose to play the game in order to proceed the development of our characters. Around release I switched back from draenei to human to get a rep boost for the new reputation factions as well as the few ones I still haven’t reached exalted with.

I haven’t really been playing a lot of World of Warcraft outside of raiding with the guild. There have been many distractions, but also it seems as a whole the expansion seems to be a lot lacklustre. One of the first things I noticed upon release was how there wasn’t much ambience to the new cities. Whereas Dalaran left an impression with the water fountain, the toy shop and the underbelly amongst other things, the capital cities remain fairly static and boring. I love the makeover, for Stormwind at least, but idling in the new cities just isn’t the same without Minigob Manabonk sheeping me.

I did a bit of the new Azeroth and I absolutely love Thousand Needles. Sailing up and down the zone is great and relaxing and I can only wish Blizzard gave us the ability to use that River Boat anywhere and also have the ability to fish from it. One of the potentially coolest vanity item available and it is restricted to the one zone that people will spend a few days on. Completely wasted!

Archeology has to be the least well-disguised grind ever. Its release iteration was so horrible and unrewarding it felt like you were punishing yourself for attempting to even break from the monotony of idling in a city. Presently it is still pretty bad if you were hoping to get vanity items out of it, but at least you get some gold out of it. Having minimum profession requirements for some items is terrible though. Either make it transparent to the player about the possible rewards or don’t have them. I still can barely bring myself to complete more than two or three artifacts each time.

So overall that’s what I currently feel about the game in general, next time I will probably go into more about Raids & Dungeons. It’s much more exciting and will probably be more positive than this post!

Around last weekend the new talents redesign was announced, and today they were implemented into the current build of the beta. Blizzard have improved the interface to make more clearer for the novice player, and from some screenshots that I’ve seen, they have even included the Dungeon Finder icon for healer, dps and tank into the frame of each spec.

It has been a while since I was a new player, as I started playing during the US open beta way back in mid-2004. Even when the EU retail version came out a year later I still had a miniscule idea of how the game mechanics worked, but it never really mattered since raiding hadn’t hit its full stride by that time. My first character was a rogue, and throughout the levelling I had put my points into the dagger tree, a friend’s recommendation. But as swords and maces tended to be better in raw damage I never used Ambush throughout those 60 levels. Luckily there will probably be a tooltip for it now! It’s been a long time coming.

Now to try and analyze what talents I will be using on my characters..

The talents have been drastically improved to the point where it can be quite a tough decision to make in regards to point placement. Luckily there seems to be only one route to go with the other trees if you’re shadow, and that is for the Inner Fire talent. It helps that the talents you take for Inner Fire is a survivability and a damage increasing talent.

Psychic Scream doesn’t seem to be changed much and still looks worthless to me, but it does unlock Silence which has an inbuilt interrupt now, making it more attractive to take. But 3 points for something freely available to most classes seems worthless unless they do more with it, such as adding a buff for a successful interrupt or something.

Went to Vegas, came back and didn’t really feel like playing WoW therefore didnt feel like blogging about it, plus have some uni crap to catch up with. Excuses out of the way, here are a couple videos.

It’s amazing the quality between how crap our first time kills are and our subsequent farming kills.

The Valentines event, Love is in the Air, started last night at midnight. I just so happened to be in Ironforge at the time to realise that it had begun and immediately flew to Shadowfang Keep to check the new boss out. Seeing as how most event bosses are generally really easy to kill, we tried it out as a trio. Turns out they were pretty easy! As for the loot:

Times thrice.

After the event boss we did a daily heroic – which was Azjol Nerub – and found we were randomly getting Lovely Charms. It was only when the warrior thunderclapped the small adds just before the drop after Hadronox did I realise that: 1) Killing blows were required and 2) They had to be a non-grey level. So knowing this, the best places to farm would be instances where there were quick kill quick respawn mobs like the Stratholme zombies or areas where you control a vehicle or use bombs to mow down hordes of enemies like the bombing run quests in TBC. I opted to farm the Lovely Charms in Ulduar:

This technique may end up being hotfixed, but it’s doubtful, due to the many ways of exploiting it. Some people do bombing run quests in Icecrown, or even running over the bone guards in the Battle Before the Citadel daily. But the fastest is just spamming fireballs in Ulduar. These Lovely Charms convert into Lovely Charm Bracelets, which are then traded for the Love Token currency. In order to complete the meta achievement, you will need:

In total, 113 Love Tokens. Considering Nation of Adoration and Dangerous Love, thats 92 extra Lovely Charm Bracelets that are needed to be converted to Love Tokens to complete everything. It’s not hard, just time consuming! I did it all within a few hours: